Auschwitz Bombing Debate - Why Bombing Was Not Considered

Why Bombing Was Not Considered

1. Bombing Auschwitz (or the rail lines leading to it) was physically impossible until the beginning of 1944, and it would have required a very significant re-allocation of resources from other efforts, such as preparation for and support of the Normandy invasion.
2. The idea of bombing Auschwitz was not conceived until May 1944, when Allied air forces were most heavily tied up by their round-the-clock raids on transportation infrastructure in the West of France, in advance of Normandy.
3. The idea of bombing Auschwitz was proposed in the late spring and summer of 1944 by a tiny handful of individuals on the periphery, and it was not supported by any major organization. In fact, it was specifically rejected by the most important Jewish groups.
4. When the idea of bombing Auschwitz was transmitted by the War Refugee Board to the War Department in the summer and early autumn of 1944, it was specifically done so without any endorsement by the WRB.
5. The effectiveness of such a bombing raid was questioned. Contemporary experts who have examined the issue in recent years have questioned just how effective such a raid might have been.

As it was just beginning to get organized, at the beginning of 1944, the War Refugee Board asked Jewish organizations and other groups helping refugees for suggestions on what it should do. Not one suggested bombing extermination camps or rail lines leading to them. There is no evidence that anybody came up with the idea before May 1944. Apparently the first such proposal was made by a Slovak rabbi, Michael Dov Ber Weissmandel, to the Jewish Agency on May 16. At about the same time, two officials of the Jewish Agency in Palestine separately made similar suggestions. Yitzhak Gruenbaum made his to the U.S. Consul-General in Jerusalem, Lowell C. Pinkerton, and Moshe Shertok made his to George Hall, the British under secretary of state for foreign affairs. However, the idea was promptly squashed by the Executive Board of the Jewish Agency. On June 11, 1944, the Executive, with David Ben-Gurion in the chair, overwhelmingly rejected a proposal to ask the Allies to bomb the railroad lines and the death camps, with Ben-Gurion summing up:

"The view of the board is that we should not ask the Allies to bomb places where there are Jews."

Shortly thereafter, Benjamin Akzin, a junior official on the War Refugee Board staff made a similar recommendation. It was put in writing in an inter-office memorandum dated June 29 to his superior, a senior staff member, Lawrence S. Lesser. These recommendations were totally rejected by leading Jewish organizations. On June 28, Lesser met with A. Leon Kubowitzki, the head of the Rescue Department of the World Jewish Congress, who flatly opposed the idea. On July 1, Kubowitzki followed up with a letter to War Refugee Board Director John W. Pehle, recalling his conversation with Lesser and stating:

"The destruction of the death installations can not be done by bombing from the air, as the first victims would be the Jews who are gathered in these camps, and such a bombing would be a welcome pretext for the Germans to assert that their Jewish victims have been massacred not by their killers, but by the Allied bombers."

When Pehle first discussed the idea with the War Department's John J. McCloy that June, he specifically told McCloy that he was transmitting an idea proposed by others, that he had “several doubts about the matter,” and that he was not “at this point at least, requesting the War Department to take any action on this proposal other than to appropriately explore it.” Several times thereafter, in the summer and early autumn of 1944, the War Refugee Board relayed to the War Department suggestions by others that Auschwitz and/or the rail lines be bombed. It repeatedly noted that it was not endorsing any of them.

Finally, on November 8, 1944, Pehle half-heartedly changed sides and asked McCloy to bomb the camp. He said it could help some of the inmates to escape and would be good for the “morale of underground groups.” According to Kai Bird, Nahum Goldman, apparently also changed his mind. Sometime that autumn, Goldmann went to see McCloy in his Pentagon office and personally raised the bombing issue with him. However, by November 1944, Auschwitz was more or less completely shut down.

Since the controversy exploded in the 1970s, a number of military experts have looked at the problems involved in bombing Auschwitz and the rail lines and have concluded that it would have been extremely difficult and risky and that the chances of achieving significant results would have been small. It appears reasonable to assume that McCloy was accurate in his early statements that the idea was never discussed with President Roosevelt. In his dotage McCloy may have found it expedient to share with FDR the blame heaped on him by Monday-morning quarterbacks and by those who seek to blame somebody in addition to, or even instead of, the Germans for the holocaust.